Noelle Acheson is a veteran of company analysis and member of CoinDesk’s product team. The following article originally appeared in Institutional Crypto by CoinDesk, a newsletter for the institutional market, with news and views on crypto infrastructure delivered every Tuesday. Sign up here. via Pocket

<p>Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and carries a public ledger of all transactions—so there are multiple sites that track payments to known bitcoin addresses for far-right and so-called alt-lite figures. The “Neonazi BTC Tracker” on Twitter (@neonaziwallets), run by John Bambenek of the computer security service ThreatSTOP, documents the flow of cryptocurrency funds within the white nationalist subculture. Bambenek has also worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center on monitoring these groups.

“Bitcoin provides these neo-Nazi terror groups—and they are terror groups—the ability to raise and spend money in a way that’s hard to disrupt,” Bambenek told Foreign Policy. “But it also provides an intelligence analyst like me unfettered ability to surveil them, because they surrender all their privacy rights by using it—because bitcoin’s ledger is public.”

Cashing out your bitcoins can be tricky. There are only a few cryptocurrency exchanges that one can get U.S. dollars out of with any trust or reliability, and banks are reluctant to touch money from cryptos. “Bitcoin only means something if you can turn it into actual money or stuff,” Bambenek said. “That can only happen in a few hundred places—and many of those places have been immensely helpful [to the anti-Nazi cause].”

…It helps Bambenek’s work that neo-Nazis lack the self-restraint not to publicly reveal themselves—for example, one recent transaction sent 0.001488 bitcoins (about $5.93 at the time) to the Daily Stormer. “1488” is a number that is used as a signal between neo-Nazis—“14” is for the white supremacist slogan known as “the fourteen words” (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”), and “88” is for “Heil Hitler.”

“These guys can’t help but identify themselves,” Bambenek said. “It surprises me they are such an odd combination of arrogance and incompetence.”</p>

The arrogance comes with the territory; the incompetence they make themselves.

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At the peak of the 2017 bitcoin bubble, many worried that neo-Nazis who had bought into bitcoin were now rich and well-resourced.
That wealth, however, wasn’t as invisible as the far-right would like. Bitcoin is pseudonymous, not anonymous, and carries a public ledger of all transactions—so there are multiple sites that track payments to known bitcoin addresses for far-right and so-called alt-lite figures. The “Neonazi BTC Tracker” on Twitter (@neonaziwallets), run by John Bambenek of the computer security service ThreatSTOP, documents the flow of cryptocurrency funds within the white nationalist subculture. Bambenek has also worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center on monitoring these groups.
“Bitcoin provides these neo-Nazi terror groups—and they are terror groups—the ability to raise and spend money in a way that’s hard to disrupt,” Bambenek told Foreign Policy. “But it also provides an intelligence analyst like me unfettered ability to surveil them, because they surrender all their privacy rights by using it—because bitcoin’s ledger is public.”
Cashing out your bitcoins can be tricky. There are only a few cryptocurrency exchanges that one can get U.S. dollars out of with any trust or reliability, and banks are reluctant to touch money from cryptos. “Bitcoin only means something if you can turn it into actual money or stuff,” Bambenek said. “That can only happen in a few hundred places—and many of those places have been immensely helpful [to the anti-Nazi cause].”
Coinbase, the most popular U.S. bitcoin exchange, has stated that it actively seeks and removes violent extremists from its platform. Coinbase also removes the platforms used by the extremists—it removed the far-right Twitter clone Gab after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting suspect Robert Bowers allegedly planned his mass murder there, his last Gab post being: “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
It helps Bambenek’s work that neo-Nazis lack the self-restraint not to publicly reveal themselves—for example, one recent transaction sent 0.001488 bitcoins (about $5.93 at the time) to the Daily Stormer. “1488” is a number that is used as a signal between neo-Nazis—“14” is for the white supremacist slogan known as “the fourteen words” (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”), and “88” is for “Heil Hitler.”
“These guys can’t help but identify themselves,” Bambenek said. “It surprises me they are such an odd combination of arrogance and incompetence.”
As of 2019, the online alt-right is less interested in bitcoin, said Daniel Harper, a researcher for the podcast I Don’t Speak German, which covers the online alt-right and white nationalist sphere. Aside from being ridiculously traceable, bitcoin just isn’t a good payment network.
“Bitcoin was always a means to an end—it was a way of evading some of the scrutiny of pushing cash around,” Harper said.
The white nationalist podcast network, desperate for a funding channel after being cut off from the conventional financial system, strongly advocated bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in 2017. “There were a couple of guys who saw the Federal Reserve as inherently Jewish and inflating money. But they mainly just used it as a tool, more than an ideological commitment.”
Bitcoin also failed for the neo-Nazis as a funding channel, because cryptocurrency is still too hard to use. “Nobody would go to the effort to get a bitcoin wallet to give them the 10 bucks a month that they were more than happy to give them.” One neo-Nazi podcaster found a credit card processor that was fine with the content of his show but said he was untouchable for another reason: He was considered a money laundering risk because he dealt in cryptocurrency.

This was a talk I gave at ETH Denver 2019. It has been modified a bit for this written, rather than spoken, format. If you would prefer to watch the talk, you can watch it by clicking here and then skipping to 5:31.? Today we are going to talk about balancing usability with security. via Pocket

<p>It remains unclear precisely how much cash the startup has lifted from its investors, but its entry on ICO Watchlist indicates Prodeum completed 18 percent from its funding goal. For context, its white paper lists the soft and hard caps for the ICO at 2,100 and 5,400 ETH, respectively. The current price of Ethereum is $1,194, according to CoinMarketCap.

Prodeum is the latest cryptocurrency company to pull an exit scam.

Last year, a sketchy Bitcoin investment platform known as BitPetite suddenly went dark, leaving with all of its investors’ coins.

Only weeks later, another cryptocurrency company, called Confido, wiped its digital fingerprints and dashed off with its customers’ investments. The move came days after its founders said they’ve ran into legal obstacles.</p>

I'd be trying to sell any of those junk "coins" - actually penny shares without the voting rights - if I'd bought any.

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